Before I was a brokenheart,I was a siren. I was a whip-lash after a wreck.An anxious foghornbleating. When I was in love,I felt uncertain—a tightropewalker wavering, halfslipping, half leapinginto the net. Nowthe body shirks its duties.It murkifies, scornsits porous borders. Allits walls are sponges,its ceilings seep.There is a wet luckvibrating in an attic.Then there is a greenneed growing a corrugatedtail. Transformation is juncturewhere linkages fail. BeforeI was a brokenheart. And now:Who is listeningto a leandream impaled, sailriding a contortedhorn—some mulesome mare weft througha tapestry that groansas it tears? She molts. She rears.Before I was a brokenheart, and now—
From the Horns
Lauren Russell
Save me from the lion’s mouth: for thou hast heard me from the horns of unicorns.—PSALM 22:21 (KING JAMES BIBLE)
Feature Date
- December 28, 2024
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“From the Horns” from A WINDOW THAT CAN NEITHER OPEN NOR CLOSE: by Lauren Russell.
Published by Milkweed on August 27, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Lauren Russell.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Photo:
Joanna Eldredge Morrissey
Joanna Eldredge Morrissey
Lauren Russell is the author of A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close: Poems, Plots, Chance (Milkweed Editions, 2024); Descent (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Anna Rabinowitz Award; and What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta Press, 2017). Russell has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and residencies from Ucross, Yaddo, and MacDowell, among others. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The New York Times Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
“Russell’s hybrid collection is powerhouse poetry, a lighthouse calling us out of the personal and systemic haze that surrounds a life with disabilities, without denying the resilience required every moment just to paddle back to shore. Window is lonely, wise, and necessary reading. We needed this collection decades ago, not only as a clear lens into neurodivergence, but as a study in human empathy for others and ourselves.”
—Eric Vachon, The Rumpus
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